Ryen Rusillo of ESPN Radio’s “Russillo and Kanell” believes he now has the best car he’s ever driven — his 2016 supercharged V8 Range Rover.

“I’ve always had SUVs and for the first time I tried a sedan, I had a Lexus. And I really missed being in an SUV,” Russillo says. “I’ve had Tahoes, Durangos, pickup trucks, my first car was a pickup truck with a lift kit in it. I just missed being in one and I always wanted one, so I figured why not now, before I get married and have a wife and they tell me I can’t buy it.”

Russillo has always lived in the Northeast and having gone to college in Vermont, not having a four-wheel drive was a nonstarter. “I’ve become accustomed to them and I wanted to fit in with all the other cool people at ESPN — a lot of people actually have Range Rovers,” he says, in jest.

Though Russillo gives his Range Rover a perfect 10, there is one slight drawback. “You’re going faster than you realize. The acceleration, the V8 is unlike anything I’ve ever driven,” he says, adding he’s had no problems with it mechanically. “I’ve heard people say they get a little tricky after a few years, but I’m not going to have it for five years. I’m in and out with cars every few years.”

Russillo had two cars until recently, when the lease was up on his 2014 Lexus IS 350 F Sport, which he rated an 8 out of 10. It was the only sedan he’s ever had in 25 years of driving.

“I wanted something different, I just wanted to try a sedan and I really liked it,” he says. “I wanted to try something a little racier. It has an incredible setting for sport plus where the steering wheel and shocks and everything really stiffen up, and it responds incredibly. It keeps it revved at a lot higher RPM as you down shift, so it really feels like a race car. The only problem is now that I’ve been driving the Range Rover, I actually think the Range Rover would beat it in a race.”

Russillo leases since it gives him a chance to try new cars. “I have a car guy. I just give him an idea of what I want to do. It can be a month later, ‘Hey, I’ve got a deal,’ or it can be six months later. I’m patient, I don’t really care. I never would show up and say, ‘Today I’m buying a car,’” he says. “I’ll wait it out until I see something I like, and he’s always told me, ‘If you don’t want to put any money down and you’re not going to keep the car long term and you can afford it, and not being married and not having a kid,’ it’s something I’ve done. I had a Tahoe and the Lexus, and I had only the Lexus for a year. It was just one car and then once I saw the Range Rover deal, it was like, “Alright, I’ll grab that now and I know I’ll get rid of Lexus at the end of September.”

Russillo likes having access to a guy who specializes in new car purchases. “I just don’t understand people that don’t research things. For the life of me, I don’t get that. He looks out for me,” he says. “I bought the Tahoe and he sold it for me and then got me my Range Rover. I take care of him, but it’s not like I have somebody on the payroll that’s constantly doing all my car deals for me. It’s not that expensive.”

The Range Rover is Russillo’s first splurge car. “This was a big investment when I think about the cars that I’ve had in the past. You just have to decide, ‘I’m doing this no matter what,’ because there’s car people and there’s people that aren’t,” he says. “People go, ‘If you’re doing alright and you can pay your bills, buy what you want to buy, buy something you’ve always wanted.’ I have other friends who cant fathom paying a certain amount for a car, and I totally get where they’re coming from too.”

Car he learned to drive in

A 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am is shown here.

Another dream car, to bring things full circle, he says, is the one that Russillo learned to drive in – a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. Although Russillo grew up on Martha’s Vineyard, he learned to drive up in Holland, Vermont, where the family spent their summers. The Trans Am was his neighbor’s, and he recalls it was a 1980 model year.

“It was the Burt Reynolds Smokey and Bandit edition. I don’t even know if the car was street legal, but we would just drive it down these back roads,” Russillo says. “I would like to find a nice , done-up Firebird with a T-top, but they don’t have any of those up here, so I look online in Florida. It would be hard to buy something like that without truly trusting that you know that the chassis’s been done right, the transmission’s good to go. Maybe I’ll start smoking cigarettes and start driving around with no shirt on in the neighborhood and have my T-top down. Not that I smoke now, but I’d have to pick it up I would think if I buy that.”

Russillo was 13 when his neighbor taught him how to drive in that Trans Am. “No one even cared – there were these back roads, and I wasn’t even close to being of age and they would just let us burn down these dirt roads,” he says. “It had some Bondo work on it and I was always hoping to one day get a Smokey and the Bandit edition completely redone when I get a little bit older. It’s not super practical in the Northeast because I can’t drive it with the T-top as much as I like, but I still would hope to one day get one.”

Learning to drive early on came in handy for Russillo, whose dad worked construction and would often throw his back out. “I would, during stretches, drive him around without a license. I would just drive to the job sites and take care of stuff. He was like, ‘If we get pulled over, we get pulled over.’ That was at 14 and 15, before I had a license. I would say I was a self taught prodigy,” Russillo says, with a laugh. “We knew if I was going get pulled over they would understand that my father’s back is out and he can barely move and we have to check on some job sites.”

First car bought

During college in Vermont, with money he made bartending, Russillo bought a 1988 Toyota pickup with a six inch lift kit on it (a stock 1986 truck is shown here), which he was “very proud of and I had the tailgate removed and replaced it with a GatorNet. Back in the day, they would have those nets, the ones they used to race,” he says. “I loved the lift kit on it and I would race other SUVs on back roads. We would show up and race each other. I never got in trouble. The only thing they would care about is if we were doing it to shine deer, and none of us were doing that. You pull up on deer and you shine the high beams on them and they freeze and then you can shoot them and kill them. (Editor’s note: This is generally an illegal hunting practice) But we weren’t doing that.”

Rusillo says it seemed like everyone in his college had cars. “The school I went to, people were very well off and people had brand new SUVs like the 1995 Pathfinder was a huge deal, and they had just come out,” he says. “People were getting the Land Rover Discoveries, the Defender 90. So people were getting really expensive cars and I bought a used pickup and people thought it was like a toy and would want to drive it and then they’d want to beat on it. I used to get pretty pissed off.”

The University of Vermont was a state school, but it attracted a lot of out of state students. “It was extremely inexpensive for out of state kids. So a lot of kids from all over the country, if you don’t want to go to Boulder, you can go there and live in this amazing town and be 45 minutes from one of the best resorts ski-wise in the East coast. Some of the people that I’d met there were some of the richest people I’d ever met, and I grew up on Martha’s Vineyard,” he says. “Our parking lot at our house was like a showroom and then I would have this beat up pickup truck. So you pull up your driveway and there’d be Range Rovers, Pathfinders and then there would be my pickup. Although one of my roommates was even poorer than I was at the time. It was a hatchback thing, it was beat to hell.”

While his pickup truck stood out even among the expensive rides in college, one girl wasn’t that impressed. “I remember I went out on a date with a girl and she was almost horrified and didn’t want to get into it,” he recalls. “She couldn’t believe that a guy really had a pickup truck with a lift kit and net on it. She thought I was a redneck.”

Favorite road trip

“My favorite road to drive on is Beach Road, which is the ride from Oaks Bluffs to Edgartown on Martha’s Vineyard because it’s surrounded by a lagoon and the Atlantic Ocean,” he says. “If the weather’s really whipping up from the ocean, it’s a cool experience because it’s not lit and it’s surrounded by water on both sides. At night, it can be a really weird experience. At night, it can be a really weird experience, it’s where part of the first Jaws was filmed. When they have that scene where they think the kid is going to be chased by the shark into the lagoon and that bridge, that road is where that part of ‘Jaws’ was filmed.”

Russillo points out that during the day it’s gorgeous because you see the lagoon and the exclusive homes that line the lagoon, with the beach on the other side, but at night it feels different.

“It’s kind of creepy, especially if it’s windy or the rain is whipping. It’s island weather. But it’s something whenever I come home, it only takes five, 10 minutes, but I always find myself cruising it. I’ll take the long way from Beach Road because I just like the drive. If you went 50 you’d probably get pulled over,” he says, with a laugh. “That’s the thing about driving on the Vineyard, it’s not like you’re pushing the cars to the limit. But it’s incredibly scenic and it’s a completely different experience depending on what time of day you do it.”

ESPN Radio’s “Russillo and Kanell” 1-4 p.m. EST

It’s been just over a year since Danny Kanell joined Russillo as co-host of their radio show on ESPN.

“It’s just a really good mix of somebody like Danny who’s played all these different sports – he played minor league baseball, he played in the NFL, he won a lot of awards at Florida State,” Rusillo says. “The best thing about our show is the longer that you’re with us, the better we’re going to be to you. One day we may not say something that makes headlines, but long term, day to day, I don’t think there’s anybody that’s doing it better in the country when it comes to dissecting what’s happening, being reasonable about it, and not being assholes like everybody else that wants to just get a reaction and doesn’t care about being consistent whatsoever.”

Russillo says their show was the first to talk about some things that happened in the NBA before others, like “Durant leaving Oklahoma City, or Lebron going back to Cleveland. We’ve been on it earlier than most,” he says.

His ESPN Radio gig helps with Russillo’s love of cars too. “I’m into cars now and it’s nice to be into something you can afford,” he says, laughing. “As opposed to before, looking at cars going, ‘I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get one of these things.’ And then you go, ‘Alright. Eff it, I’m just going to get one.’ I’m in it right now. Every time I get in this car, I absolutely love it.”